I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Monday, December 31, 2012

KOTW: If at first you don't succeed

"If at first you don't succeed, try try again" is a folksy little encouragement toward persistence. But the joking version goes "If at first you don't succeed, maybe skydiving isn't for you." That one cautions against taking persistence into the realms of madness. Kinda like this guy:http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=15717264

And OK, this is not a particularly impressive loss-mail in its own right. Just a badly-fit Buzzard with a pile of EVE holiday gifts in the cargo hold, plus a few odds and ends obviously picked up in scannable sites. I assumed this guy was just carrying this little junk pile to Jita to sell, got caught on a low-sec gate on the way, and bang. It probably wasn't smart carrying all of that in a Buzzard with no Covert Ops Cloak, but hey, it happens in New Eden every day. The kill originally came to my attention because it came with a lot of player rage. Like this:

DrugsDen> cuntDrugsDen> fuck youDrugsDen> skillless sack of shit

and this:

From: DrugsDenSent: 2012.12.31 11:38To: Reilly Smallz,

fuck you skillless ganker go play in the fuckin road!

and this:

From: DrugsDenSent: 2012.12.31 11:53To: Don Dark,

what a dumb fuck you are i had no time to do anything at all as i had just jumped from the gate you pair of skillless wankers was sitting on! prick

To answer the eternal EVE question: yes, he mad. Happy holidays to you, sir, and may your new year be pleasant and cheerful. And honestly, if that's all that there was to it, I would have smiled, gone on with my life, and picked something else to be kill of the week. But digging a little deeper, I found that it isn't all there is to it.

It turns out this guy dies all the time... to the tune of some six billion ISK lost in the last two years alone... and only five kills in all that time. This isn't even the first time he's died in a Buzzard with no Covert Ops Cloak. Maybe he doesn't know about Covert Ops Cloaks at all: he's lost at least six Buzzards without one in the last year. Or how not to die in a low-sec Drake (5+ losses) or a low-sec Raven (4+ losses). Or how to fit a cloaky Tengu (also with no Covert Ops Cloak, and no Interdiction Nullifier). Or that a Venture that has a Harbinger land nearby can just... you know... warp off.

But he keeps going out there in these same ships and these same fittings and dying over and over again.

This is a hard game. I'm not one to bash on a new player that's having difficulties. I specifically try to avoid bashing on these kinds of fitting problems, in fact. But DrugsDen, if you're out there, join RvB or EVE University or another EVE teaching corporation. Please! You'll enjoy this game a lot more and you'll be much less angry. 'cause as it stands right now, if at first you don't succeed, maybe skydiving isn't for you.

Number of dead super-caps this week: 0

Not a single super-cap appears to have died between 24 December and 30 December. But an Anshar popped up on my radar that died to an interesting tactic. And since JFs seem to be becoming just as expensive as super-caps, it will stand in until some super-caps die.

This Anshar was the most expensive thing to die this week, and it died due to an interesting tactic. At the time of this kill, TNT alliance was under a war-dec by Disposition Matrix. If you insist on getting your JF through high-sec despite the war-dec, you might think it's safe to scout each system on your route with an alt scout. If there are no war targets in the next system, you jump in your Anshar and send your scout to the next system on. This guy, however, gets around that by having his main logged-off near in-gates. He uses his own alt scout to see a war-dec'ed JF coming. Once the JF jumps through, he sacrifices the alt in a tackle ship to ensure the initial tackle on the JF while he logs in his main DPS. Main DPS warps in from one million kilometers off the gate, initial tackle dies to CONCORD... but it doesn't matter because by that time the main can reapply tackle and ensure the JF doesn't escape. Kinda clever! It's something to keep in mind if you're ever in this situation yourself.

Hopefully, we'll have some super-caps die this week. Here's to more fun kill-mails in 2013!

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